“... never get it,’ our teacher had said a few weeks previously). I was there again in May 2007 when Tony Blair announced he was stepping down as prime minister and leader of the Labour Party. Both times we watched political history live on TV. I don’t recall anything about Cameron’s acceptance speech (telling), but I’ve never forgotten ...”

“... has been running three a day, starting as soon as the election was announced. ‘Historically you may have placed more value on voter identification, so you wouldn’t spend huge amounts of time on the doorstep. But now, data you may have relied on for decades is completely out the window. You don’t know where the votes ...”

“... secular triumph – a fragile narrative that had to be constantly retold. Contemporary Russia may like to see itself as the saviour of a religious tradition all but obliterated by the communists, but this too is a fragile narrative. The traces that survive suggest a less straightforward ...”

“... adult life outside the UK (in Poland, Italy, France, Morocco, Mexico, Turkey and Thailand), which may explain why he has been called a contemporary Graham Greene, an epithet which does him few favours, since his prose has little in common with Greene’s and the moral issues that preoccupy him have nothing to do with Catholicism. His novels include all the ...”

“... art and culture. He wanted, as he put it, to ‘capture the soul of Spain in a museum’ and, in May 1904, he founded the society as a free public library, museum and educational institution. The RA show is the last leg of an international tour while the Society’s neoclassical buildings in Washington Heights are being refurbished.The selection in the main ...”

“... provide a portrait of the civic negligence that became rampant in Austerity Britain. Beckham may have joined the 12-hour queue to pay his respects when the queen was lying in state, but the state itself doesn’t matter to him, except in the hugely sentimental way that fans interpret loyalty.Thankfully, we have Posh to keep up the Lols. The main point ...”

“... But collecting an egg is no different from stealing it. An egg in an oologist’s collection may appear intact, but it will have been pierced (sometimes twice) in order to extract its contents. The pristine shell once held the promise of new life; now it holds nothing at all. Great auk eggs were particularly sought after because of their size and ...”

“... troops. There has been no talk of pulling them out, either from HTS or the US. What comes next may be couched by international observers in the aseptic language of ‘transition’, but is there a state left to take over? Julani may not be able to control the forces that joined his push from the south, let alone the ...”

“... Romain Bertrand, one of the contributors, notes that the 17th-century diplomat Thomas Roe may have had a grandiose sense of his mission at the Mughal court, but Emperor Jahangir didn’t bother to note Roe’s visit in his memoirs. He did, however, discuss in detail his relations with Shah Abbas of Persia. This isn’t the way the British have seen ...”

“... also have our own supersized mindfuck when it comes to the accumulating and spaffing of cash. You may not believe it, as the cost of living crisis rages and the planet boils, but London – having just lost its status as Russia’s favourite laundromat – is now the private jet capital of Europe. ‘The obvious reason that private airlines have done so well ...”

“... gestures, its crude and balletic violence, took me out of myself. Fine; though the macho posturing may also have beefed up my internalised homophobia. But really, I think the appeal of wrestling, its significance, was that it so completely engaged me with questions of artifice, with the techniques and demands of storytelling, with the projection and testing of ...”

“... the referendum campaign. The SNP, it turns out, is just another party.The independence movement may not have been as transformative as its supporters hoped, but it was, for a time, genuinely exciting. It raised the political stakes, insisting that those who wanted to rule should offer something worth going outside (or at least online) for. The SNP briefly ...”

“... Wrong Miliband Brother, though Blair’s lucrative contracts with oil-exporting Gulf autocracies may also have moved him). For the resurgent if never entirely cogent ‘Blue Labour’ tendency, the answer is to embrace the rightward social shift while making nebulous gestures towards leftish economic nationalism. One sad indicator of the ideological shift is ...”

“... up on a plate like John the Baptist’s.A portrait of Katherine’s nephew Richard Sackville may have been intended to mark the lavish festivities, in February 1613, for the marriage of James I’s daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Richard – a notorious spendthrift – was one of a handful of courtiers who, according to ...”

“... a declaration of war on Germany’. Nolte goes on to suggest that this ‘official declaration may give grounds in support of the momentous thesis that it allowed Hitler to treat the Jews as prisoners of war and, that is, intern them.’ (This reasoning, the Israeli historian Saul Friedländer has claimed, is based on an argument advanced by David ...”